The perils of using AI in legal practice have once again been brought into sharp focus, as fake cases and citations found their way into pleadings and witness statements.
AI may play a part in legal practice, and it is often used effectively for the management of large disclosure exercises, alongside human input and oversight. Lord Justice Birss famously used Chat GPT to write part of a judgment to provide a summary of an area of law. He had the expertise to recognise that the summary was acceptable.
However, citing non-existent cases in pleadings raises serious threats to the access to justice, and may result in practitioners receiving:
- Sanctions for contempt of court
- A referral to the regulator
- Strike out and cost sanctions
- Public admonishment
- Professional embarrassment
- A referral to the police for a criminal investigation, in the most egregious cases (although this is likely to be extremely rare)
In two recent cases, a barrister and a solicitor were referred to their professional regulators for citing non-existent cases in written legal arguments and a witness statement. The cases were suspected to be made up by artificial intelligence tools.
As Dias J pointed out in one case, “the administration of justice depends upon the court being able to rely without question on the integrity of those who appear before it and on their professionalism in only making submissions which can properly be supported.”
It is not simply a typo, or a lack of concentration. These ‘hallucinations’ from AI tools like Chat GPT undermine the integrity of the legal profession, and public confidence in the justice system.
Fake citations
In one case, the instructed barrister settled and signed the grounds for judicial review on behalf of the claimant. Those grounds cited five cases which do not exist, although they were presented with neutral citation numbers as a lawyer would present cases in the standard way.
The defendant’s solicitor wrote to the solicitor instructed for the claimant to say that he could not find the five cases in the grounds.
The barrister fumbled a reply, but inferred that the citations were some sort of typo that could be corrected.
Judge Victoria Sharp concluded that there were two possible scenarios for what had happened. One was that the barrister deliberately included fake citations in her written work. That would be a clear contempt of court. The other is that she did use generative artificial intelligence tools to produce her list of cases and/or to draft parts of the grounds of claim. In that event, her denial (in a witness statement supported by a statement of truth) is untruthful. Again, that would amount to contempt. In all the circumstances, the threshold for initiating contempt proceedings were met.
In the second case a solicitor produced a witness statement which contained 18 fictional cases, found by his lay client. The court found it extraordinary that the lawyer relied on his client for accurate legal research.
A warning to lawyers
In her judgment Judge Victoria Sharp explained that the overarching concern is to ensure that lawyers clearly understand the consequences of using artificial intelligence for legal research without checking that research by reference to authoritative sources.
Lawyers who do not comply with their professional obligations in this respect risk severe sanction.
Any cases should be checked against authoritative sources such as:
- The Government’s database of legislation,
- the National Archives database of court judgments,
- the official Law Reports published by the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales; and
- the databases of reputable legal publishers.
Similarly, anything that is written by AI is increasingly easy to spot as people become more familiar with its “formulaic style of prose.”
Any supervising lawyers must check the research of juniors for whom they are responsible. The court will expect appropriate oversight, which reaches all the way up to leadership responsibilities. It is not sufficient to blame the juniors. All lawyers in the firm are responsible for the integrity of the legal research carried out.
Read the judgment here: Frederick Ayinde, R (on the application of) v The London Borough of Haringey [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin)
